The History of Energy Efficiency

Once upon a time, the US wasn't really fussed about energy conservation. So what happened? From wars to oil embargoes to environmental disasters, we look at the factors that would shape energy policy and a more responsible approach to energy consumption.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And yesterday I published

(00:24):
a tech News episode. Today's date, by the way, is July,
in case you're listening in the future. But yes on
July I published a tech News episode and mentioned in
that episode a story, a fairly amusing story about how
alien Ware, which is the the Dell Computers subsidiary that

(00:45):
focuses on building you know, gaming PCs, recently acknowledged that
the company was going to have to avoid orders from
certain regions for a selection of gaming rigs, and that
these regions included six states. Those states are, by the way, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont,

(01:09):
and Washington State. Now, the reason that alien Ware was
going to have to cancel those orders is that these
particular models of these particular gaming computers exceed the energy
consumption rates that are allowed by those states regulatory bodies. So,
in other words, these states have limits on how much

(01:31):
electricity a computer system is allowed to consume per hour,
and these particular computers exceed that. So if you prefer
to look at it a different way, these computers are
too powerful or really to power hungry, and are thus
illegal in six states. Now that's being a bit hyperbolic,

(01:52):
but it's also a way to spend this that could
make those computers seem really cool, right Like if alien
Ware said it's a computer, so fat asked it's illegal
in six states, that could sell a lot of computers.
But anyway, this all got me to thinking about energy
efficiency and power consumption regulations in general. So we have

(02:13):
different certifications for energy efficiency. You might have seen different
labels on stuff that claims that a particular product meets
a certain set of standards for energy efficiency. And as
I've just pointed out, there are some states that have
some fairly strict limits on energy consumption. So what is
the history here, How did all this develop and why?

(02:35):
And what do these different certifications mean and what is
the history behind those? So today we're going to take
a look at the issue of energy efficiency. Now I
hope by the end of this episode you'll have a
better understanding of why these regulations are in place in
the first place, and why certain areas might have greater

(02:56):
restrictions compared to others. And you also know what that
energy star label actually means when you see it on
say an appliance or maybe on a home listing. So
this episode, like most of my episodes, is going to
focus largely on the United States because that's where a
lot of this evolved. But there are other regions of

(03:17):
the world that have similar stories. It's just that to
cover a global approach to this issue would require an
entire podcast series, not just an episode. However, it will
involve global events because, as it turns out, some big
events on the global scale impacted the United States approach

(03:40):
to energy consumption. So let's set the stage, and we
do have to go quite ways back to kind of
cover this. So way back in the early eighteen hundreds,
most Americans were living in rural areas. Right like in
the first few decades of the nineteenth century, only around
ten or scent of the American population were living in cities.

(04:05):
Even by eighteen sixty that percentage was still below twenty
five percent of the population. For comparisons sake, today, more
than eighty percent of all Americans live in a metropolitan area.
So urbanization plays a part of our story today. But
as we'll see the story is big and it has

(04:26):
lots of moving parts to it. So another element is
the rising dependence on fossil fuels. So up through the
eighteen fifties, one of the main resources used for stuff
like lighting fuel because you know before the light bulb,
was whale oil. But by the eighteen fifties, whale oil
was starting to get in short supply because of the

(04:47):
shortage of whales because of how they were hunted extensively.
But enterprising engineers learned how to produce kerosene by refining
crude oil, and then in the eighteen sixties we get
the first US oil refinery, which takes raw petroleum and
then refines it into a fuel that provides an alternative

(05:10):
to coal, and thus the oil rush begins. In the
latter half of the nineteen hundreds, the United States takes
the world lead in oil production and refining and provides
around of the global supply of oil. In eight other
parts of the world are getting into the oil speculation

(05:31):
craze themselves, with countries like England and the Netherlands and
Russia all discovering oil deposits, but the US continues to
lead the global stage in that regard. At the same time,
inventors start creating creating new technologies that rely upon refined
oil for operation. So a growing consumption of oil is

(05:55):
going hand in hand with the growing production of oil.
So not only are you producing more of it, but
we're finding new ways to use it. And thus the
demand continues to increase along with the supply. Uh, we
find and refine more oil, but we also consume more oil,
and it's not like we quite hit an energy excess. Instead,

(06:18):
we just find lots of new ways in order to
need that good old bubble and crude. In the early
nineteen hundreds, the rise of the automobile in the United
States would further push oil consumption to new heights, and
Ford would introduce the Model T in nineteen o eight
that was a mass produced car that actually brought automobiles

(06:40):
within the realm of purchase for a lot more households
in America. So by nineteen ten, the US demand for
gasoline had surpassed the demand for kerosene for the first time,
because you know, kerosene was being used for things like
lighting fuel and heating fuel. And now the fact that
we were starting to see a motorized population in the

(07:01):
United States meant that gasoline was becoming more in demand.
And again Ford's approach to mass production means that automobiles
are actually within the grasp of a significant percentage of
US households, not all of them, but a lot of them.
And before the automobile was essentially a vehicle for the
idly rich. Right wealthy people could afford a car, no

(07:23):
one else could until we started seeing, you know, the
the principles of mass production applied to the automobile. So
the US rapidly becomes motorized, much more rapidly than other
parts of the world. You know, part like Europe was
also getting motorized at this time, but at a much
slower rate, and thus the United States dependence upon oil

(07:46):
grew significantly as a result of this. World War One
obviously would change things up quite a bit. Countries like
Britain and France began to depend upon US oil exports
when they were, you know, needing fuel to help in
their war efforts, and of course, the Germans worked to

(08:07):
disrupt supply lines between the United States and these countries,
and when the US entered the war in nineteen seventeen,
the demands for US oil exceeded domestic production. At that point,
the US was still supplying oil to its allies, but
it also needed oil to provide for domestic use right

(08:27):
for people back here in the States, and so in
order to supplement oil production in the US, the United
States began to import oil from Mexico because now it
just couldn't produce enough to meet all the demands. By
nineteen nineteen, the U s Geological Survey comes up with
a startling revelation and incorrect one, as it would turn out,

(08:51):
but they didn't know it at the time, and that
revelation was that the United States supply of oil was
going to run out within a decade. So by nineteen
twenty nine, oil reserves were going to be gone. Now,
at that point, the United States was producing around a
million barrels of oil every day, and consumption rates meant
that of that oil was being consumed domestically. So again

(09:15):
that means the only ten of US oil was available
as an export. Everything else was was immediately being used
because consumption rates were on the rise. Meanwhile, overseas in
the Middle East, Britain and France were overseeing regions that
they called protectorates. Though I'm sure the locals had less

(09:35):
you know, nice words to describe them. The Middle East
was proving to be rich with oil, and Britain and
France were doing their best to keep US oil companies
out of the Middle East because this way, you know,
Britain and France, by overseeing these protectorates, could get access
to that oil and thus remove their dependency upon US oil.

(09:59):
They wouldn't have to win port as much because they
would just essentially take the oil that was in these protectorates.
By the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, oil
diplomacy had become a major part of politics as various
countries saw their energy needs hinging on access to oil
production and oil refinery. So an agreement called the nineteen

(10:22):
twenty eight Red Line Agreement established an oil monopoly in
the Middle East, governed by the Iraq Petroleum Company, which
in itself was made up of multiple partners, including an
American oil company, and the agreement essentially laid out rules
that prohibited these partners from independently drilling for oil outside

(10:45):
of the partnership, you know, within this specific region of
the Middle East that was defined by this Red Line,
and they were all supposed to engage in what was
called a self denial clause. So if any one partner
of this group were to pursue oil interests within this region,
that partner would then be obligated to share that with

(11:07):
other partners. They could not claim it for their own.
Every partner within this UH this organization would have equal
right to it. This Iraq Petroleum Company, and again that
was essentially a cartel. It was the the one authority
for how the oil in this region could be exploited. However,

(11:30):
it turned out that the back in the United States,
that geological survey that said the US was going to
run out of oil was totes wrong, and in fact,
the US would begin to produce a surplus of oil.
And that meant that the supply actually outpaced the demand
for oil. And thus if you have a lot of
supply and lower demand, prices drop an oil prices plummeted. Now,

(11:56):
the government tried to respond to this by putting in
quotas for oil auction, saying don't produce more than x
amount in order to limit the effect of these price drops.
Like so this was to protect oil companies from you know,
having financial disaster because suddenly the stuff they provide is
so plentiful that they can't make a profit off of

(12:18):
it anymore. By the way, the Supreme Court would later
overturn those quotas. But then we get up to World
War Two, which obviously really complicated things. For one thing,
Mexico took the step of nationalizing oil production within that country,
something that many other countries would do in the following years.
And in the process, Mexico revoked US oil concessions, which

(12:41):
was a move that the US did not counter for
fear that if it did counter that, if it put
any sort of political pressure on Mexico, it might push
Mexico to align with the access powers in World War two.
So again politics plays a huge part in this. Now,
during World War Two, the United States against to ration
various resources and luxuries, and one of those resources is gasoline.

(13:06):
The US government issues gas coupons which limits how much
gasoline citizens are allowed to get, and also institutes a
national speed limit of thirty five miles per hour, again
to cut back on consumption. Uh, you know, the slower
speeds would mean less fuel consumption even over great distances. Now,

(13:31):
by the end of World War two, this would completely
do a one eight. At that point, consumption would boom.
Returning soldiers start buying homes and houses and appliances. At least,
you know, if they were white, they were able to
do that. There's plenty out there about the unfair practices
that disproportionately harmed people of color who are coming back

(13:55):
from World War Two. Anyway, there's a proliferation of inventions
around this time and that gain popularity, everything from air
conditioners to refrigerators, to televisions to brand new automobiles, including
gas guzzlers. And here's the thing. At the time, there
was plenty of oil to power all that stuff, whether

(14:15):
it was you know, using oil in the process of
electricity generation or oil being used in order to refine
it into gasoline. There's enough to go around. It was
a time of plenty. The US also starts to reach
out to Saudi Arabia at this time and established connections
just as that nation was discovering enormous oil fields within

(14:38):
its borders. It would actually take a few years before
the United States would import a massive amount of oil
from Saudi Arabia. But this is where the foundation was laid.
In the mid nineteen forties and from nineteen to nineteen fifty,
we see a transformation in the United States. The increased
consumption requires more oil than the US can produce. Finally,

(14:59):
demand is actually outpacing supply, So in nineteen forty five,
the US is a net oil exporter because it's producing
more than it needs. But by nineteen fifty it's a
net oil importer, bringing in nearly a million barrels of
oil every day. This was just the beginning of a
trend that would see the US import more and more

(15:21):
oil from other nations, including the Middle East. In nineteen
fifty two, the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Massadiq, nationalized
the oil industry there not by coincidence. Just two years later,
there's a military coup in Iran, supported by British and
US intelligence. By the end of nineteen fifty four, there's

(15:41):
a new Iranian government headed by a shah who agrees
to allow US oil companies to manage Iran's oil industry.
So technically the companies don't own the oil, but they're
allowed to manage the industry. Uh this, you know, this
is again another one of those cases where you see
energy and politics just tightly intertwined. Here. Then we get

(16:05):
to the Suez Crisis, which was a very complicated affair
that's best left to some other podcast than mine. And
by nineteen fifty nine, the US faces another over supply
of oil. So President Eisenhower issues an import quota and
that limits foreign imports of oil to know more than
nine percent of domestic production, saying all right, well, let's

(16:28):
not bring in more and completely destroy this economy. While
we'll have plenty of oil for our energy needs, we
would also at the same time undermine the industry that
it's built upon. So the following year, in nineteen sixty,
a group of countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and

(16:49):
Iran in the Middle East, and as well as Venezuela
in South America, all form a group called the Organization
of the Petroleum Exporting Countries or OPEC. Now, the reason
that they did this was that the United States and
various nations in Europe had been essentially dictating things like
oil prices without actually consulting these countries in a lot

(17:13):
of the countries where the oil was coming from, and
so these these nations, like the United States and various
countries in Europe were largely seen as being exploitative. They
were exploiting the resources of these other oil producing countries
for their own advantage. Now, it would take several years
before OPEC would actually have enough political leverage and economic

(17:36):
leverage so that countries like the United States would even
really pay attention to them. But that would come to pass,
and then we move ahead by like a decade a
little more than that, and we come to a conflict that,
depending upon your perspective, you might call the yam Kapoor War,
or you might call it the Rama Don War. You
might call it the nineteen seventy three Arab Israeli War.

(17:59):
That conflict began on October six nine, and it lasted
until October twenty six of that same year. Now, this
was the fourth in a series of major conflicts between
Israel and various Arabic nations in the Middle East, and
it largely stemmed. This particular one largely stemmed from a
demand that Egypt was making to Israel. Egypt was telling

(18:23):
Israel to return certain territories that Israel had received in
the previous conflict, the Six Days War, and Israel declined
that demand, and then hostilities followed. Well. A full discussion
of these conflicts again goes well beyond this show. I
imagine the hosts of stuff you missed in history class

(18:44):
would put together a phenomenal breakdown of the incredibly complicated
scenarios that led to these conflicts. But for our purposes,
the salient point here is that on October nineteenth, two
weeks into the conflict, the then US President Richard Nixon,
sent a request to Congress to extend two point to
billion dollars worth of emergency aid to Israel, which was

(19:07):
a move that Arabic countries would protest. I'll explain more,
but first let's take a quick break. So, in response
to the United States extending aid to Israel in the
form of two point to billion dollars worth of it,

(19:30):
the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Companies, so kind of
a subset of OPEQ, elected to raise an oil embargo
against the United States. Now this had happened once before
in the conflict in nineteen sixty seven between Israel and
Egypt and Syria and Jordan's that was the Sixth Day

(19:51):
War I mentioned before the break, and during that time
Arabic country is placed an oil embargo on all of
Israel's allies but at that time, the United States was
able to offset that embargo with domestic production, so it
didn't really affect the US that much. But it was
a very different story in nineteen seventy three. In fact,

(20:15):
nineteen seventy three was a particularly vulnerable time for the
United States. While the country had placed an import quota
years earlier due to that over supply I mentioned where
you know, the US could not import more than nine
percent of domestic production, otherwise you would have over supply.
While all that had changed, by nineteen seventy three, oil

(20:36):
production in the United States was lagging behind the demand
for oil. So this oil embargo ended up having a
much larger effect on the US in nineteen seventy three
than the one from nineteen sixty seven. Gasolene prices rose
by forty percent. Now you know that that conspicuous consumption

(21:00):
that had really driven the fifties and sixties was unsustainable.
In the seventies, the big gas guzzlers that were the
hallmarks of US automotive industry were now a liability. Politically,
the US government moved to form a plan to gain
energy independence by nine eight. Spoiler alert, that didn't happen.

(21:22):
Advisors were pointing out how energy dependence on imported fuel
sources isn't just a matter of energy, it's also a
matter of national security. And so in the early to
mid nineteen seventies we saw the first programs launched dedicated
to improving energy efficiency and lowering energy consumption. The oil

(21:44):
embargo lasted until March of nineteen seventy four, but the
effects of that embargo would stretch on much further. The
experience really emphasized a need to reduce energy consumption so
that when things are tight, the U. S economy would
not grind to a halt. And so we started seeing
some big changes, like here in the United States. One

(22:07):
major change that happened was the US government passed a
mandate that capped highway speeds to fifty five miles per hour.
Now these days that's not necessarily the case. It can
vary from region to region. But as a kid, I
remember that all highways had that as the top speed
limit fifty at the time. When I was a kid,

(22:29):
I just assumed that those limits were there because somewhere
some number crunchers figured out that there was a balance
between letting people get to where they needed to go
within a timely fashion and cutting down on the severity
of traffic accidents. Except it wasn't really about safety, it
was about conserving gasoline consumption. That's why that speed limit

(22:52):
was there. Now, the state of California would lead the
way when it came to setting energy efficiency standards. The
state established energy consumption standards starting in nineteen seventy four.
California has the largest population of the fifties states here
in the United States, and the energy crisis was keenly

(23:13):
felt in California, especially when it comes to gasoline. The
matter was somewhat mitigated in that most of California actually
has a pretty mild climate, so that reduces the need
for energy consumption on a per capita basis for things
like heating and cooling. That's not as big of an

(23:33):
issue in California during most years. During the era of
climate change, it's a different story. But we're talking about
the seventies here, So the key here is that California
has frequently led the pack when it comes to energy
efficiency and power consumption policies. In ninet two really big
things happened that relate to this podcast. One is that

(23:56):
I was born and without me this episode wouldn't exist.
I wouldn't be here to talk to you. But the
more important thing for this topic is that the United
States government passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. The
goals of this piece of legislation were many. One was
to give the president more executive options in the face
of an energy crisis in order to speed up the

(24:19):
response process, so if something goes wrong, the president can
do something about it quickly without having to go through
all the bells and whistles that you would normally have
to do. Another was to increase US energy production while
simultaneously lowering energy consumption, so produce more but use less.

(24:40):
In other words. Part of that focus was on creating
rules about efficiencies, with a large focus on automobiles. This
is where we start to see rules for a minimum
miles per gallon rate for vehicles. So in the early
nineteen seventies, the average miles per gallon rate for a
passenger car in the United States was around thirteen to

(25:01):
fourteen miles per gallon, which is pretty bad, and there
were some gas guzzlers that were way worse than that.
The new legislation set standards that car manufacturers would need
to meet in order to you know, sell their cars
or to receive certain incentives or subsidies, And in nineteen
seventy eight that minimum was set at eighteen miles per gallon,

(25:24):
and it went up each successive year like with it
reaching twenty seven point five gallons by the mid nineteen eighties.
Now the law also gave authority to the newly formed
Department of Energy in the United States to set energy
conservation standards for equipment and appliances. So the Department of
Energy began to set minimum efficiency standards for a selection

(25:48):
of different technologies. In nineteen seventy eight, an oil workers
strike in Iran escalated to an outright revolution, with the
Iranian shaw fleeing in nineteen seventy nine and the country
coming under new leadership, the Ayatola. And in addition, a
group of Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran

(26:09):
in nineteen seventy nine and took more than sixty Americans hostage.
The US President Jimmy Carter leveled an embargo on oil
imports from Iran, and oil prices escalated to more than
twice the going amount as a result. Following that was
an oil shortage in the United States with long lines

(26:30):
at gas stations and super high gas prices. President Carter
signed the Energy Security Act, which encouraged the pursuit of
fossil fuel alternatives. Now at this stage, the reason for
doing that was primarily because of the continuing political and
economic dependence upon fossil fuel imports. It was not because

(26:53):
of the environmental impact of fossil fuels. That also is
a factor, But the main concern here was if we're
dependent upon fossil fuels and we're getting a significant percentage
of our fossil fuels from foreign sources and then foreign
conflicts breakout, we're kind of up the creek. So we

(27:14):
need to find a different way. And that's why this
Act was about looking into alternatives for fossil fuels. In
this era, there was a lot of activity. Uh, there
was a lot of innovation, and there was a lot
of failure in the realm of energy efficiencies and lower
energy consumption. By that, I mean organizations attempted to take

(27:35):
some steps towards energy conservation, but with varying degrees of success.
Sometimes it was the smallest of actions, like it was
telling companies, hey put up signs that tell people to
flip off the light switches at the end of a
day so that they're not wasting electricity. And that's important,
and it does reduce waste, but it's kind of a

(27:56):
tiny drop in the bucket compared to some other activities.
Were companies that were producing products that claimed to help
reduce energy consumption, like plug this in between. You know,
your outlet and whatever it is you're you're using the
electricity for, Like this would be a go between that
somehow would magically reduce the amount of electricity you were consuming.

(28:19):
But a lot of these were of dubious effectiveness and
amounted to a little more than a black box that
didn't really do anything at all. Also, they were scams.
In other words, most of them were. This is something
we still encounter today. In fact, manufacturing companies were having
a little bit more impact. Guided by the requirements of
the Energy Act of nineteen five and a subsequent amendment

(28:42):
to that Act in nineteen seventy nine, companies making big
appliances like refrigerators and washers and dryers and air conditioners
and that kind of thing began to innovate in being
able to do more while consuming less energy. The days
of seemingly endless energy were long gone, and now the
name of the game was figuring out how to outperform

(29:04):
the competition while still being energy efficient. California continued to
lead the way news standards in night set new goals.
The state consulted with various engineers and energy experts to
draft the standards, and further, those standards would increase the
efficiency requirements every three years automatically, so you would have

(29:28):
a certain set of standards. Three years later, those standards
would get more strict. Three years after that they would
increase again. They would do so no matter who was
in office. Uh that included the building code in California,
so every three years, the building code would get more
strict and there were numerous benefits to this approach. One

(29:51):
was that due to those higher standards, Californians were starting
to consume less energy on an individual basis, which meant
their electricity bills were going down. People in California were
spending less for electricity even as electricity costs would increase.
The consumption was going down, so the bills were going down.

(30:11):
The standards also meant that California didn't have to go
into a phase of building out new power plant facilities
they didn't have to increase production, in other words, because
they were reducing consumption, and obviously if they had increased
production and built more power plants, that would have had
an enormous negative environmental impact. So this also helped cut

(30:34):
down on smog generation, which was a problem that was
huge in California, to the point that if you grew
up in the same era that I did, you probably
associated the words smog with Los Angeles like that was
a defining feature of l A and it didn't appear
to come at the cost of California's economy. In fact,

(30:55):
California's economic growth outpaced that of the US as a whole,
so the state was able to do this and not
have it make a negative impact on economy. That's often
a counter argument to adopting environmentally friendly or energy efficient
processes is that it could have a negative economic impact,

(31:16):
But in reality, in the regions where we see states
and other countries adopt more restrictive regulations, we don't tend
to see a huge hit to the economy. That seems
to be a fallacious argument. So there were both federal

(31:37):
and state energy efficiency regulations at play here, and if
you are in the United states. The ones that apply
to you depend entirely on where you reside. For example,
I live in the state of Georgia. Now, according to
the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, my state
ranks number forty two out of fifty one in the

(31:57):
United States. And you might say, hey, the United States,
it only has fifty states. Well, the a c e
E is also including Washington, d C in this scorecard.
That ain't great. And uh, the neighboring states to Georgia,
at least to our right and left, are kind of
in a similar boat. So South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and

(32:19):
Louisiana all rank in the forties. But some other states
like Vermont, Massachusetts, Washington State, and several others have adopted
energy standards similar to California's, and they have a much
better track record when it comes to energy consumption. Now,
before I move on, I should also point out that

(32:40):
you can't just compare apples to apples. There are a
lot of factors at play here. For example, the Southeastern
United States has a climate that's pretty brutal for about
half the year. Although with climate change, I think we've
got some pretty stiff competition now but we often have
very hot, very humid summers, and that means we're frequently
using more energy to keep cool during those months. But honestly,

(33:03):
over the past few years, we've seen a lot of
areas of the country hit just as hard, if not harder,
than we are, So that story is changing over time.
Now I've got a lot more to say about energy efficiency,
but before I get to that, let's take another quick break.

(33:27):
So I've mentioned a couple of things here about energy
efficiency and the factors that that play a role, but
there are a lot of other complicating factors that also
come into play. So the economic and political issues with
oil provided the initial urgency to move towards energy efficiency,
But then there was also this growing awareness of the
environmental impact of fossil fuels that was developing around the

(33:51):
same time. Now, there were environmental activists working hard in
the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, of course, but you
know that, I think an event that really brought this
issue into the national focus was a man made disaster
that happened in nine That's when the Exxon valdis And

(34:12):
oil tanker carrying more than ten million gallons of crude
oil struck a reef off the coast of Alaska and
spilled its contents into the region, and it caused an
unprecedented man made environmental disaster. So this was in the
news day after day, complete with disturbing videos of the

(34:33):
impact on the Alaskan coastline and the wildlife, and it
would stand as the worst oil spill in American history
until twenty ten. That's when Deepwater Horizon, when that oil
platform released even more oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
But arguably the Valdis was one that was far more

(34:54):
visible because of the impact it had on that region. Now,
while these were acute disasters with a truly enormous scale,
there was this growing understanding in the general public as
to the effects of fossil fuels on the environment in general,
even without disasters. The idea of greenhouse gas emissions, of

(35:17):
the emissions of various chemicals that could lead to acid
rain like these were things that were starting to become
clear in the American consciousness around this time. And so
around the late eighties and early nineties, we saw the
conversation around energy consumption include not just energy costs and efficiency,

(35:38):
as in, you can save money by switching to you know,
more efficient technologies. But now we also had environmental impact
become part of the conversation, so the story gets a
bit more complicated in other words, And interestingly, these days,
you're far more likely to see energy efficiency come stations

(36:00):
contextualized as an environmental issue. Which, don't get me wrong,
it is an environmental issue, but it's also all these
other things that we've already talked about. You know, it's
also a national security issue, it's an economic issue, it's
a political issue, etcetera. It's all of these things at

(36:20):
the same time. Personally, I believe if you reduce it
down to just one factor, it's misleading. Now, admittedly it's
way easier to talk about if you reduce it down
to one. You know that that makes it an easier
to message, but it actually reduces how important this is

(36:41):
on multiple fronts. So this brings us up to that's
when the Environmental Protection Agency or e p A, introduces
a program called green Lights. The e p A formed
on December two, nineteen seventy, under the executive order of
President Richard Nixon, and the purpose of the e p
A was to consolidate the U. S. Government's environmental responsibilities.

(37:05):
The government was responding to various environmental crises and issues,
and this was a way of kind of focusing the
government's role with that regard. Now, over the years and
over the various presidential administrations since nineteen seventy, the e
p a's role has changed a great deal. But on

(37:26):
January six and initiated the Green Lights Program, which pushed
for US organizations, including companies and government agencies to adopt
energy efficient lighting. Now, at the heart of the matter
here was energy waste. According to the e p A,
twenty five of all electricity consumption at that time was

(37:49):
going to lighting, and stuff like incandescent light bulbs were
highly inefficient, with most of that energy the vast majority
of the ergy sent to these light bulbs going into
turning into waste heat rather than light. In fact, incandescent
bulbs only convert somewhere between five and ten percent of

(38:10):
the energy they receive into visible light, and the rest
is waste heat. Fluorescence or CFL bulbs are far more
energy efficient than incandescent bulbs. Commercial and consumer led light bulbs,
like the kind used you know that you would use
to light your room, those really didn't have a presence

(38:31):
in the early nineties. They are obviously available today, but
those are even way more efficient than both incandescence and CFLs.
But let's get back to green lights. So the e
p A was advocating for a move for less wasteful
you know, light lighting solutions, which would not only provide

(38:52):
an environmental benefit, but would also lead to lower energy consumption.
Thus it would costs to use these kinds of light bulbs.
In the long run, the bulbs or the tubes or
whatever would last longer, they would use less power, and
that meant over the course of a single light bulb

(39:13):
the organization would spend less money on it. That would
mean that the organization would actually profit off of cutting
back on waste. It might be a higher upfront investment
to buy CFLs over incandescence, but over the life of
that CFL you would more than save the money you

(39:34):
would have spent on a larger number of incandescent bulbs.
So this was a pretty good message and it would
also be part of the move to abandon incandescent bulbs.
I mean, you can still find some types of incandescent
bulbs today, especially like those specialized like Edison bulb types,
but for the most part, we've moved away from those.

(39:55):
The e p A stated, quote, every kilowatt hour of
electricity not used prevents the emission of one and a
half pounds of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas,
also five point eight grams of sulfur dioxide, a principal
component of acid rain, and two point five grams of

(40:16):
nitrogen oxides, precursor to both acid rain and smog, as
well as the pollution attendant upon mining and transporting power
plant fuels and disposing of power plant wastes in the quote.
So the e p A was taking a pretty big
picture approach with this messaging, of which I approved because
when we get a really narrow focus, we miss out

(40:38):
on a lot of stuff. In the e p A
made another move, one that would have a big effect
on the consumer electronics industry, and that is when the
e p A launched the Energy Star Label. Now, the
program identified energy efficient products with a special Energy Star
label or sticker. Products that matched or exceeded the energy

(41:01):
efficiency standards that were set by the e p A
would qualify for this designation, which would serve as a
guide for consumers. When it came time to shop for
various types of technology. When we come back, I'll talk
a little bit more about energy Star to explain how

(41:22):
it works. When the e p A first launched energy Star,
which would eventually actually incorporate the green Lights program that
that had launched the year before. Green Lights would then
incorporate into energy Star, well, when it launched it, the

(41:44):
focus was on computer systems and computer displays, or rather,
I should say computer monitors display as being far too
grand to describe what we were using back in those days.
So this kind of gets at an issue that we
saw with alien where and its computers. Because the six
states that Dell is not going to be shipping alien

(42:06):
Ware computers to or these specific models, I should say,
all have energy standards for computers that the alien Ware
models don't meet. They exceed those standards, they're not as
energy efficient as is required, so they cannot be shipped there.
According to an e p A publication that was celebrating
the twentieth anniversary of the launch of energy Star, the

(42:30):
program was apocryphal. Lee sprung from an office tour that
the then director of the e p a's Atmospheric Pollution
Prevention Division took back in nineteen nineties. So the idea
is this director is walking around an office after hours,
just taking a look to see what's going on, and

(42:50):
according to the story, he was upset that a number
of the employees at the e P A, we're not
shutting down their computers at the end of the day.
And his point was, we know that increased energy consumption
leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions, and that this in
turn affects climate change, and yet we, the people who

(43:12):
know this and who are in charge of trying to
protect the environment, are doing this. So the machines were
continuing to run after hours, consuming electricity and thus contributing
to air pollution. And so he saw the need to
launch a program that would encourage technical solutions to human problems.
If people were too lazy to turn off their computers,

(43:34):
or if for some reason they believe that turning computers
off and on again too many times would decrease the
useful lifespan of those machines, there needed to be some
sort of technology solution to encourage computer manufacturers to build
in standby or low power modes that would engage automatically
after some period of inactivity. Now the e p A

(43:57):
says this story is only kind of sore true, and
that there were in fact a lot of people working
on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and how to
create a path for companies to go that particular route.
It wasn't enough to say this will cause less pollution.
There needed to be some economic incentives as well. So

(44:19):
here's your proposition. If you're the e p A. You
tell companies, hey, here's how much money you're spending just
to keep those machines running when no one is there
to use them. That's just money down the drain. And
businesses hate throwing money down the drain. Now, I mean,

(44:41):
some businesses are actually pretty free with their cash, and
you could argue that some of the stuff that business
has spend money on effectively is the same as throwing
it down the drain, but they prefer to feel like
they're getting something out of using cash, and just spending
money to keep computers running when no one is around
to use them doesn't really make the cut. So then

(45:03):
you've got these companies which need to use computers, wanting
a solution to an economic problem, and this creates an
incentive for the computer manufacturers who want to land those
suite orders with big businesses to provide, you know, a
truckload of computers for an office. So the computer manufacturers
have an incentive to create a more power efficient computer

(45:26):
to meet the expectations of these customers, who in turn
see these computers as an investment both in resources and
in decreased wastage. And along the way, we see electricity
being used by the organization's computer systems UH at a
lower level, and that means less of a load on

(45:47):
the power grid and ultimately less of an environmental impact.
So this is kind of like three D chess, y'all. Now,
I should also remind you the bag in the early nineties,
computer monitors, as I kind of alluded to early were different.
We are not talking about flat led displays that are
really energy efficient. I'm talking about big, old, honking electricity

(46:10):
hungry cathode ray tube or CRT monitors. Sometimes these things
weighed more than a small child and they were not
energy efficient devices. So the e p A launches this
market driven approach towards energy efficiency totally voluntary. This is

(46:31):
not like you must meet these qualifications or you're not
allowed to produce monitors. Instead, it's if you meet these,
then you get an energy Star rating. You know, that
Energy Star rating was originally for computers and monitors that
would go into a low power sleep mode after a
period of inactivity. That was pretty much it. This mode

(46:53):
meant that they should consume thirty watts or less when
they're operating, so when they're in sleep mode, it should
be thirty watts or less to keep them in sleep mode.
As long as it met those criteria, then the Energy
Star label could be slapped onto those products, and that
Energy Star label would then give consumers the heads up
regarding which systems were compliant with these specifications. Even if

(47:17):
they didn't know what the specifications were, they knew, oh,
this particular monitor has an Energy Star label on it,
which means it consumes less electricity. And no one was
required to do this. It was totally voluntary. But following
those specs, men a company could include that Energy Star
label and that became a marketing tool and the program

(47:39):
saw some early success, and before long the e PA
began to extend the Energy Star program to other types
of technology. At first, it's stuck around with office technology
and then moved on to things like like printers instead
of just computers and monitors. So the idea here was
that corporations and offices have a lot of technology and

(47:59):
them and it gets a lot of use, right And thus,
if you get a few big companies to make the
investment into lower energy uh consumption, high energy efficiency products,
that would have a bigger impact than trying to convince
individual consumers to follow suit. So the strategy was that
the companies would lead the way and then consumers would

(48:21):
also follow along. And for the most part that was
true consumers looking to save money on their electric bills
or those who are concerned about the impact that their
lifestyle was having on the environment. And to be fair,
there was some overlap with those two groups. They began
to rely on the energy Star label as one of
the factors that would matter when they start making a

(48:43):
purchasing decision. I mean, if you've got to go out
and buy a new fridge, it kind of makes sense
that one of the criteria you consider is how much
energy is that fridge going to require? How much is
that fridge going to cost you in electricity bills over
the course of you owning it and getting one that's
going to cost you less while having the features you want.

(49:05):
Just makes sense. So the e p A expanded beyond
consumer products with its Energy Star program, and in it
extended the program to evaluate homes so that people looking
to buy a house could look for homes that meet
Energy Star specifications. So stuff like insulation and energy efficient
doors and windows and all this kind of stuff would

(49:27):
all count towards an Energy Star designation, which would tell
the consumer, Hey, I'm gonna have to spend less to
heat or cool this house because of that label, and
I have the good feeling of knowing that it meets
these requirements, and I'm going to be less wasteful and
thus have less of a negative impact on the environment. Now,

(49:47):
I think a big thing to take away from the
Energy Star program was how it helped create a market
based solution for energy efficiency. By creating a designation that
gives consumers an idea of the impact of in particular product,
the e p A created a way from manufacturers to
try and stand out against the competition, and then that

(50:07):
created a market pressure that meant other companies needed to
follow suit or else get left behind. If your products
do not meet those Energy Star standards and your competitors do,
then you might see a negative impact in sales, and
so Energy Star in that sense was a really big success.
It pushed companies to create more energy efficient products. Meanwhile,

(50:31):
we saw both the federal government and some states but
into place tougher energy consumption standards. So in two thousand
five of the U. S. Government passed the Energy Policy Act.
That legislation set new appliance energy standards, also created new
tax incentives designed to encourage more efficient use of energy
and lower energy consumption in general. Growing energy prices prompted

(50:54):
another law in two thousand seven that was the Energy
Independence and Security Act. This again increased standards in various
areas regarding energy consumption, and as the name suggests, the
goal is to find an equilibrium or or better case
in which the United States energy needs are met by
the United States energy production, making it unnecessary to import

(51:17):
stuff like oil from other countries. This was a big
focus of the proposed hydrogen economy, the idea being that
the United States could transition from a fossil fuel based
economy to one based on hydrogen, we would have no
need to import oil from foreign sources. Of course, the
problem there is that switching to anything besides fossil fuels

(51:38):
is big and expensive and hard. We've got an infrastructure
for fossil fuels that dates back more than a century.
There's a lot of inertia that's built up there. Further well,
hydrogen is the most abundant element in our universe. It's
also the type of element that bonds with other stuff.
So in order for us to get hydrogen so that

(52:00):
we can make use of it for the purposes of energy,
we first have to exert some energy in order to
break those chemical bonds and free up hydrogen. So unless
we do that in a way where the energy and
the hydrogen is greater than whatever energy we had to
pour into the system in order to get the hydrogen,
you're at a losing proposition. But the hydrogen economy is

(52:21):
really a matter for another episode, and in fact I
have covered it in the past. Generally speaking, energy efficiency
remains a pretty big topic. I would say that most
of the time we see this conversation revolve around the
environmental impact of fossil fuels and the issue of climate change,
and these are undeniably important and big and real concerns,

(52:44):
and energy consumption definitely plays a part here, as electricity
production makes up one quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions
in the United States and transportation is twenty nine so
even more than electricity, at least according to the e
p A. So energy efficiency standards really matter here. They

(53:05):
can make a huge difference. And as we move forward
with an increased emphasis on switching to alternative energy sources
and moving away from fossil fuels as well as pushed
towards electrifying the fleet of vehicles out there, energy efficiency
will continue to be a critical part of our strategy.
You want to be efficient, you want to have lower

(53:26):
energy consumption. That's going to be important for all sorts
of things with electric vehicles. It will be important for
the you know, the purposes of how much driving range
do you get with this car? Because we can only
make batteries up to a certain size. Before that starts
to become an issue too, you start seeing issues like
weight and safety and other things play a part. So

(53:48):
you have to say, well, if we can make more
efficient use of electricity, then a charge on this battery
will allow this card to go much further than if
we're not careful. Right, So they're a lot of reasons
to be careful with energy consumption. Even should we make
the move away from fossil fuels. So that I think

(54:09):
is a good encapsulation of the concept of energy efficiency
and energy consumption and why it's important to have these
regulations and standards in place, and that it is more
than the climate. Like if you're the type of person
who doesn't see the big deal about climate issues, well
I I don't understand that. But even if you are,

(54:30):
there's still the matter of the fact that it just
makes more economic sense to be more efficient with your
energy usage. And if money doesn't matter to you and
the climate doesn't matter to you, I'm wondering how you
ended up getting equipment to be able to listen to
a podcast. But anyway, that's it for this episode. I

(54:51):
hope you learned something. I hope you enjoyed it. Like
I said, there are a lot of complicated parts of
this story that I hope are being covered in other
podcasts because I would also love to hear them. Uh,
And they are important for us to have an understanding
of how we got to where we are and helps
inform us of the decisions we need to make to

(55:13):
get to where we want to be. All of that's
really important. If you have suggestions for topics that I
should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff. I welcome
you to reach out to me and let me know.
The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
handle for the show is text Stuff H s W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff

(55:39):
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
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